Conventionally, trends in communication are continuing to show rapid growth in network bandwidth requirements. In particular, commercial fiber-optic networks are seeing a rapid transition from 10 Gbps channels to 100 Gbps channels. Research results for 1000 Gbps channels are becoming commonplace, too. As individual channel rates scale beyond 100 Gbps, signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) becomes more critical. In a conventional system, SNR is used to determine degradation, failure, or fault conditions whereby protection switching is used. There does not exist a system and method for adaptively configuring various levels of throughput (e.g., discrete or continuous) when SNR varies. Further, systems exist utilizing optical virtual concatenation along with optical packet switching to provide a programmable or dynamic expansion and contraction of bandwidth over time driven by changes in a demand for bandwidth and/or operational requirement changes over time. However, there does not exist an integrated approach to manage optical bandwidth based on SNR, demand, and the like.